Mordecai Williams lay in his bed at the Montrose Sanitarium, still as the night and quiet as the dead. Except he wasn’t dead. He was just asleep in the darkness of a five-year coma, brought on by a gunshot wound to the head. His vital signs were otherwise stable and doctors determined he was not in imminent danger of dying. They were hopeful, if not confident, that he would somehow awaken one day, look around the room and ask, “Where the hell am I?”
Until that day arrived, Williams was receiving the best medical care that Montrose could provide, the goal being to prevent further physical and neurological damage. Once he was stabilized, doctors took steps necessary to keep him as healthy as possible.
Doctors watched him carefully, waiting and hoping for the day he would awaken from the coma and rejoin the living, but knowing full well that on any given day he could lapse into a vegetative state where recovery would become impossible and decisions would have to be made—painful decisions about whether to keep Williams alive or allow him to pass peacefully into death.
On the fifth anniversary of his treatment, a nurse’s aide giving Williams a sponge bath thought she saw his eyes open, look around the room and close again, but when she summoned a doctor, he could find no sign that Williams was waking up. “Sometimes there’s a flutter,” Dr. Stanley Rockwell told the young woman. “It’s not all that uncommon in coma patients. You may even see him move his head a little from time to time. You can always come and get me when that happens, but like today, it may not mean a thing.”
A few weeks later, when he was in his room alone, Mordecai Williams opened his eyes again and looked around the room ….
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